England and Australia's cricket teams are playing five Test matches in summer 2019. Here's how to watch the Ashes live on TV or online, and how to watch free highlights and listen on the radio

England and Australia's cricket teams are playing five Tests in summer 2019. Here's how to watch the Ashes live

After a phenomenal World Cup victory and a palate-cleansing win over Ireland, England's men's cricket team now move on to the second main course of a tasty summer. It's time for the Ashes: England vs Australia, in the latest instalment of arguably the spiciest - and certainly the oldest - rivalry in international cricket.

In this article we explain how to watch the England vs Australia 2019 cricket matches live on TV or online, and how to listen live or watch the highlights.

The next match is:

5th Test (The Oval, London): 12-16 September, 11am each day

Match schedule

Across August and September 2019, England and Australia are playing 5 Test matches. There are no limited-overs games in this series, presumably because we're all burned out from the World Cup.

1st Test (Edgbaston, Birmingham): 1-5 August 2019, starting each day at 11am UK time. Australia won by 251 runs

How to watch on Sky Sports

The England vs Australia 2019 cricket matches are being shown exclusively live by Sky Sports in the UK. The matches are shown on the Sky Sports Cricket channel and (where other events allow) Sky Sports Main Event: you can see every ball live throughout the series, then again in highlights and analysis to fill the boring hours when there is no lovely live cricket to watch.

Sky Q

The starting prices above relate to Sky's standard offerings, but the firm's Sky Q premium service adds a number of new features that may be of interest to cricket fans, such as Ultra HD and multi-camera coverage, 1080 50p Hawk-Eye and extra stats from CricViz.

How to watch with Now TV

If you're not already a Sky Sports subscriber, and don't want to commit to a long-term Sky contract just to watch five games of cricket, you should consider Now TV, which lets you pay on a one-off basis.

Now TV has a pay-as-you-go Sky Sports Pass option that lets you pay for either a day, week or month of Sky Sports. You can then watch the action for as long as you've paid for on your browser, on the TV app or on the mobile app.

A day pass costs £7.99 and lasts 24 hours from purchase. A week pass costs £12.99 and gets you (unsurprisingly) 7 days, while the month pass costs £33.99 per month and rolls on to the next month unless you cancel it.

How to use a VPN

If you're a British viewer going abroad and want to watch using your existing UK services, you can use a VPN to 'browse from the UK' and access Sky Sports and Now TV as usual. NordVPN is our top recommendation, but our best VPN chart rounds up the best services for accessing UK content from abroad.

How to watch free highlights

English cricket has made some questionable decisions when it comes to making live coverage of games free to watch; but if you're willing to wait a while, it's easier than ever to find free highlights.

Channel 5 has the official highlights gig in the UK, and shows around an hour of highlights - a fairly comprehensive roundup of the big moments - on the evening of each match. These will start at 7pm.

How to follow the score online

The BBC Sport website offers live scores and text updates, but we prefer to use Cricinfo, which has detailed ball-by-ball coverage.

How to get updates on your Apple Watch

If you're at a barbecue and don't want to seem unsociable by constantly checking the score on your phone, install the ECB app on your iPhone and Apple Watch instead. It's a pretty limited app but has one brilliant feature: wicket alerts.

Once the match is underway, open the app on your phone and tap on the relevant fixture in the Matches tab. Tap the sharing icon at the top right, then Turn On Push Notifications.

Now, whenever a wicket falls you'll get a notification on your phone (if the screen is on) or your watch (if it's not). You may have to tinker with your notification settings to get this working the way you want.